“Get out! All of you, get out!” Qingyan’s firm shout echoed through the stuffy wooden room.
Without waiting for a response from the armed men who were still stunned, Qingyan stood up—ignoring the dizziness in her head—then used all her strength to shove them over the threshold. Finally, she slammed the old door shut and fastened the wooden latch.
BANG!
Qingyan leaned against the door, breathing rapidly. Her heart pounded like a war drum. She looked around the room: rotting wooden walls, a tarnished bronze mirror, a dull vanity, and dusty fabrics.
“Crazy... This is crazy!” Qingyan ran both hands through her hair, half out of her mind with panic. “Where am I?! Why are my clothes like this? Why did that girl call me Miss and mention poison?”
She paced back and forth in the middle of the room like a worm on a hot skillet. Her normally rational doctor’s mind was now a complete mess.
“Could it be... that lightning just now? Did I enter a novel?!” Qingyan slapped both cheeks hard enough to turn them red. “Ow, that hurts! So this isn’t a dream! But how do I get out?! Do I have to die first before I can return to my apartment, or what?! Oh, God, the medical malpractice case in the real world isn’t even over yet. Why did I end up stranded in this trashy novel?!”
Outside the door, A-Man’s panicked voice rang out as he pounded on the wood.
“Miss! Miss Qingyan, open the door, Miss! I beg you, don’t do anything reckless! The Third Prince and Master could become even angrier!”
“A-Man, be quiet for a minute! I’m thinking!” Qingyan shouted back, her head growing even more dizzy.
Before Qingyan could find a way out of her panic, the sound of numerous firm footsteps approached from the courtyard. The guards and servants suddenly fell silent when a deep, authoritative voice thundered from outside.
“You had to lock even the door of this rotten wooden house?! You ungrateful wretch!”
It was Prime Minister Lin—the father of the body’s original owner.
“Male servants, break down the door right now!” ordered a woman whose voice was falsely gentle but laced with venom. It was Consort Yan.
CRASH! BANG!
The already-fragile wooden door was smashed to pieces after two blows from a pair of burly soldiers. Splinters flew through the air as Prime Minister Lin strode inside, his face flushed with rage, accompanied by Consort Yan, who acted worried at his side.
Qingyan leaped backward, startled by the thunderous impact.
“Lin Qingyan!” her father roared, pointing at her face with a finger trembling in anger. “How long are you going to keep up this ridiculous drama?! How dare you lock yourself away and refuse an order from the imperial palace! Don’t pretend you’ve been poisoned just to get attention and avoid punishment!”
Qingyan froze for a moment. Foreign memories belonging to the body’s original owner suddenly flashed through her mind: how the two-faced middle-aged woman beside her had slowly slipped arsenic into her mother’s food until she died, then pinned the blame on her and had her exiled to the borderlands.
The sense of injustice she had felt in the modern world after being accused of medical malpractice suddenly fused with the original owner’s anguish. Qingyan’s fury burned away her panic.
“Poisoning drama?” Qingyan let out a mocking laugh, staring fearlessly at her father with a sharp gaze. “Honorable Prime Minister, if you have eyes and a brain, look at my blackened lips and weakened pulse! This isn’t a drama. It’s an attempt at slow murder!”
She shifted her piercing gaze directly toward Consort Yan, making the woman instinctively take a step back.
“And the culprit is none other than the snake of a woman standing beside you!” Qingyan accused loudly, pointing straight at Consort Yan’s nose. “Consort Yan, who kindly sends ‘herbal supplements’ every week to this place where I’ve been exiled!”
“You... what are you talking about, Qingyan?!” Consort Yan immediately pretended to wipe away fake tears with her handkerchief. “Master, look... I’ve always sent her the best medicine to restore her health in the borderlands, but Miss Qingyan is slandering me like this...”
“Enough! Insolent!” Prime Minister Lin roared furiously. He strode forward, raising his right hand high, ready to deliver a vicious slap to Qingyan’s face. “You unfilial wretch! How dare you accuse your own mother!”
Yet before that thick palm could land on her cheek, Qingyan neither closed her eyes nor whimpered in fear like the old Lin Qingyan would have.
With the quick reflexes of a modern person, Qingyan instead thrust her face forward, staring straight into her father’s eyes, the veins in her neck taut and her defiance unmistakable.
“Slap me! Go ahead and slap me!” Qingyan shouted, her voice booming and bringing Prime Minister Lin’s hand to a stunned halt in midair. “Slap your legitimate daughter to death! Let the entire capital know that the honorable Prime Minister Lin killed his own daughter to defend a deceitful consort!”
The room instantly fell into a tense, suffocating silence.
Prime Minister Lin froze with his hand still suspended in the air. Consort Yan held her breath, her eyes wide with disbelief. Even the guards outside the door exchanged shocked glances.
Instead of crying, bowing her head, or begging for mercy as she usually did, this once-obedient and timid cast-off princess... now stared at them like a tiger ready to tear its prey apart.
“You...” Prime Minister Lin swallowed, his voice suddenly catching in his throat. “You... aren’t the Lin Qingyan I know.”